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Polls are in. Somehow Michigan stills shows up in three of them. Your guess is as good as mine on how we didn’t even drop in the Collegiate Baseball poll. The Coaches’ Poll (USA Today/ESPN) last week was technically the preseason, so our initial start is why we went up. Also, we faced two of the coaches voting in that poll, in Jacksonville’s Alexander Terry (who we beat 21-3 and lost 10-2) and St. John’s Ed Blankenmeyer (a team we shut down despite their being an offensive juggernaut). Another note, while pointless right now, I included the Ping! Poll in the chart. May we one day be in it.

BigTenHardball details their all weekend team. I can’t argue with any omissions like I did last week with collegebaseball360. BTH’s Brian does some quality work. Dufek might have warranted a honorable mention for his work in the bullpen, but it wasn’t that much of an oversight. Michigan showed up as follows.

2B – Kevin Cislo

OF – Ryan LaMarre

BN – Anthony Toth

BN – Jake McLouth

4th SP – Chris Fetter

Something else stands out in the list, and the rankings for that matter: Ohio State has come out of near nowhere to start the season and is playing some high quality ball. I figured them to be a candidate to vie with Indiana for third in the conference, but now… watch out.

Pythagorean Theorem. Happy Valley Hardball put out their first look at the Pythagorean Theorem for team winning percentages. The idea is that expected winning percentage is a function of runs scored and runs allowed. Currently Michigan shows up as third best in the conference, in a power poll sort of way. The emphasis on Penn State is obviously his.

Team

Runs Scored

Runs Allowed

Pyth %

Delta

1

Ohio State

67

42

0.718

-0.282

2

Illinois

47

31

0.697

-0.136

3

Michigan.

73

58

0.613

-0.165

4

Indiana

38

31

0.600

0.000

5

Minnesota

40

35

0.566

-0.148

6

Purdue

42

45

0.466

0.132

7

Michigan St

23

37

0.279

0.112

8

Penn State

25

42

0.262

-0.024

9

Northwestern

29

52

0.237

-0.013

10

Iowa

22

58

0.126

-0.041

Loss to Jacksonville Looks Better. I didn’t say good, but Jacksonville beat #6 Florida State in the midweek matchup. As stated previously, midweek games can really hurt teams. Another case this week was Indiana losing to Indiana State. Just beating some of these teams will lower our RPI later in the season, losing will really hurt. I still think we’ll lose one or two of these games later in the season, including one against Notre Dame.

Baseball Programming Update. I’ve got another pretty busy weekend planned this time around. I plan to have the Siena update out late Thursday night. I’m not sure what I’m going to do for the Mets. If anything comes out in the weekly release, I’ll be sure to let you know. It should be out today or tomorrow.

5 Comments so far

baseball is awesome and the coverage here has been fantastic. KEEP EM COMING FORMERLYANON

Steve says...

+1. Love baseball coverage. Now if we could just watch some games live.

JJ says...

This weekend will show a lot about this team. They have had some time to reflect of the past 9 games,make adjustments and be ready to play. On paper…they should win 3. Let’s see where they end up. I’m looking for another strong pitching performance like the season started. Go Blue!

CDubbs says...

You’re coverage of Michigan Baseball reads like a crappy engineering report in a southern accent with too much information about what you did and not enough about what you found.